Policy and weather influences on mobility during the early US COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT

As the novel coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to proliferate across the globe, it is a struggle to predict and prevent its spread. The successes of mobility interventions demonstrate how policies can help limit the person-to-person interactions that are essential to infection. With significant community spread, experts predict this virus will continue to be a threat until safe and effective vaccines have been developed and widely deployed. We aim to understand mobility changes during the first major quarantine period in the United States, measured via mobile device tracking, by assessing how people changed their behavior in response to policies and to weather. Here, we show that consistent national messaging was associated with consistent national behavioral change, regardless of local policy. Furthermore, although human behavior did vary with outdoor air temperature, these variations were not associated with variations in a proxy for the rate of encounters between people. The independence of encounters and temperatures suggests that weather-related behavioral changes will, in many cases, be of limited relevance for SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics. Both of these results are encouraging for the potential of clear national messaging to help contain any future pandemics, and possibly to help contain COVID-19.